You are responsible for sharing your phone number when you provide it to Facebook. Facebook is doing what it feels like with it. As usual.

Are people really still surprised when they find out that information they share with some free online web site is going to be used in ways that they didn't anticipate?

I agree with that statement, but many times, people might not realize that they are sharing their phone number or some other piece of personal information with the world. I only recently signed up to develop Facebook Applications, and they required me to verify my account by giving them my mobile number so they could text me a code. In doing so, this tied my cell phone number to my account and broadcast it to the world until I checked to make sure it was not doing so a day later.

Facebook takes your phonebook, not just your phone number.

I don't think this is true. I know a few people who are on facebook and use the same email address on facebook that I have them down as in my phone, and facebook mobile did nothing with their numbers (which they have not put up there).

Facebook had my number because you end up giving it when you try use the official mobile apps, and they add it to your profile at that point (which makes it available to all your contacts if you are not careful about your privacy settings). Are you sure that it doesn't have the numbers of people in your phonebook either because they explicitly added it to their profile or because they have used facebook's "mobile" options?

(unless of course this is something new: I've not touched the mobile apps for mobile version of the site as accessed via browser for some time, as to my knowledge none of them support the use of HTTPS instead of plain HTTP yet)

It definitely takes all of your contacts.

http://mashable.com/2011/08/11/facebook-phone-numbers/

"When you download Facebook’s mobile app, this feature syncs your phone’s address book with your profile. From then on you can access all of the numbers in your phone from your Facebook profile."

The issue is not new(s).

Showing a screenshot with lots of phone numbers that are less distorted than your average captcha image seems just as bad though..

Looks like the author has updated the image now: http://www.itworld.com/sites/default/files/numbers_hidden_be...

I created a dumby facebook account to get ahold of some friends who dont use email. After about a week facebook gave me an ultimatum, give them my phone number or upload a color picture of my drivers license. I decided to say good bye to facebook.

What you did is expressly against the terms of use of Facebook. It's for real people, real businesses, etc.. They were just trying to verify you're a real person, possibly your account was reported by someone as being fake.

>What you did is expressly against the terms of use of Facebook.

Yeah, I think we all know that. It doesn't mean that we're going to agree with them. Yes they were in "the right" by booting him, but that doesn't make it any less of a shitty policy.

>It's for real people, real businesses, etc..

Yep, wouldn't want to add any noise to that delicious advertiser signal!

Luckily, throwaway phone numbers are as easy to get as throwaway email accounts these days: http://voice.google.com

This won't work in this case, since the verification code is emailed to the number as an SMS message (11235551234@mycarrier.net), which Google Voice numbers do not support.

It will work, Facebook accepted my landline number just fine. There is no need to have an SMS message sent.

Not to be a total dick, but I hope that those phone numbers are disconnected because the smart ass who made the article failed on blurring out the numbers correctly...

I, for one, find the phone number integration in the mobile app (iPhone) to be very useful.

But my privacy settings are very restrictive, and I only friend people I've met.

A friend pointed this out to me this morning. When I opted out here: http://www.facebook.com/contact_importer/remove_uplo​ads.php... it said for the iphone app: "Note: Before you click Remove, you need to make sure syncing is switched off." Though, it was already switched off. Ah, good times, good times...

What's annoying is that if you disable it, it also disables syncing the other way, so you don't get photos automagically in your contacts.

How would you get those photos without sending in a phone number?

Facebook syncing contact photos down to my phone doesn't need to imply my phone sending phone numbers back in return - these two things are just conflated in the app.

How would they know which photo to send you?

Because I've linked the two contacts, obviously. But that's on the handset. There's no reason that sending photos to me implies sending phone numbers back in return.

This process implies

1) downloading all friends' profile pics from Facebook

2) manually going through each contact and linking them to proper Facebook identity

3) repeating the process every now and then for people who change their phone numbers, change profile pics, or just weren't in the contacts list since they haven't called before

Shouldn't be too hard to build such app with existing Facebook API.

"Shouldn't be too hard to build such app with existing Facebook API."

But not with the current T&C. Developers can access friends' photos, but cannot store them. Even relationships between users can only be cached for a modest period of time, not stored.

I believe profile pics have a different treatment than photos (privacy on photos is dynamic and can be revoked, while on profile pics it's public) and together with friend lists are considered part of user data.

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/best-practices/ "You can cache user data indefinitely, but we strongly recommend you use the Realtime API to keep user data current."

There's a lot going on here. Facebook reports to be a social networking site. As such, one might expect to exchange contact info with someone they meet on the site. Of course, this means Facebook actually has to store it. That's fine.

The problem is that Facebook has insecure defaults. It is reasonable for a person to assume that contact information would only be visible to their "friends" (whether or not they are accepting random people as friends is another issue). Facebook should make it painfully clear that this isn't the case, and give its users more robust tools to control their data.

Of course, even if this does happen (which it won't, because it is in Facebook's every interest to keep as much of your info public as they can), some users will still leave their contact info public and wonder why they get calls from strangers...

Remember when you learned how to write checks in the third grade? I think it is time to prepare kids for controlling their online identity formally...

I don't see anyone in my contacts list who I'm not friended with and who isn't already sharing their number in their profile in a way I can see it. Maybe he just hit a bug in the list?

This was/is a widely reported "bug" (since early last year) and is actually the main problem. If I have you in my phone's address book, and you are not on Facebook, how is it I can give permission for your phone number to be uploaded to their servers?

This was changed in updates to the app, however the fallout continues to rain down.

If you have one, using your Google voice number is perfect just for cases such as these.